Skater Taylor McClung helps time fly at Balboa Park.
Mike Blabac
At a trade show in 1996, Chad DiNenna whispered an idea to his business partner Andy Laats. One word: watches. “I’m like, ‘Oh, that’s it? That’s the whole idea?’” Laats jokes. “The idea was that watches have been made for 400 years, and they’ve really come to mean something more than telling time. It’s a badge of identity.”
When Nixon launched in 1997, Laats says there wasn’t a watch that spoke to the identity of snowboarders, skateboarders, and surfers. Nixon tapped into design aesthetics that resonated in those subcultures because those cultures were their own.
The company’s first tide watch, the Lodown, was a hit with surfers. But their first really wild success was a wide, leather-banded watch called the Rocker, which was rocked by Dave Grohl and Metallica’s James Hetfield. “Pretty quickly, people were wearing Nixon as a personal identifier,” Laats says. “You wouldn’t bring your surf or snowboard to study hall, but you could wear your watch.” “One thing that has helped us is that the right people in our world embraced the brand,” DiNenna says. When pro skater Danny Way famously jumped the Great Wall of China? Wearing a Nixon.
Nixon, Andy Laats
Their original location was vital—an iconic, highly visible, historic warehouse along the 101 Highway in Encinitas. It was a beacon that pulled in the likes of Way and Tony Hawk, surfers like Rob Machado and Lisa Andersen, and snowboarders Todd Richards, Shannon Dunn, and Dave Downing.
“The location of our first office was by design,” DiNenna says. “We wanted to represent our lifestyle in every way, and [that] became somewhat of a landmark as people cruised through one of the most influential cities for surf, skate, and snowboard cultures. There’s nothing like Encinitas, where you have a lot of pro snowboarders that make their year-round home here. And that team was a fundamental part of the DNA of the Nixon brand.”
Nixon has since moved its HQ to Carlsbad for more space. As they’ve added global offices, they’ve followed that original Encinitas blueprint—whether it’s Burleigh Heads in Australia, Hossegor in France, or in the heart of Tokyo. “We need to be on the coast. We need to be near great surf. We need to be near great skating,” Laats says.
Nixon wall clocks
The prime spots not only recruit athletes but also employees. “It’s not a requirement that to work at Nixon you’ve got to do action sports,” says president Nancy Dynan, “but you’ve got to absorb that culture, and you understand that culture when you live in the area.”
Now the company has broader appeal, with a range of watches priced all the way up to $1,600. There’s the retro-futuristic The Player, the minimalistic Time Teller, and Regulus, made with help from U.S. Special Ops agents. Under Dynan, they’re creating solar-powered watches and using reclaimed ocean plastics in watches and bags. For a legacy company that hopes to extend its run well into the future, “sustainability” is another strong, singular word.
